Proof of [Having a] Life

Reported October-November 2008, Written November 2008

*Joanna is not her real name.

Were I simply to click through her Facebook photos, I would say Joanna Reginald* lives a life of charmed leisure.

In picture after picture of the more than 4,000 she has up, I see the blonde with a frayed bob cut luxuriating in hot tubs, clad in a bathing suit that could make Barbarella blush, surrounded by 10 or 15 of her “closest” girl friends.

In others, I spot her clubbing with a man the caption explains is her boyfriend. She clutches both him and her drink, Peach Absolut—one of six or so she says she can polish off in a night. Dressed in sheaths that resemble sparkling hand towels more than they do gowns, face speckled with a constellation of beach-gleaned freckles, the 23-year-old poses with the confidence of a Rita Hayworth or Veronica Lake. She glances into the camera with haughty amusement as it catches her in yet another moment of spontaneity.

But is it really spontaneous? I can’t be sure; I’ve seen such looks many times before—on the faces of friends posing for pictures they know will end up on Facebook.

And whether or not Joanna’s photos are posed, I don’t know what she’s like when inhabiting more than a two dimensional lap top screen space.

I’ve never met her.

As a friend of a friend…of a friend, we recently made the jump to becoming so ourselves. On Facebook, that is. That “relationship” swiftly allowed me to get to know a stranger, if only through the photos of herself she has elected to upload onto the site.

But even through those photos, it’s clear she takes going out seriously and documenting that going out more seriously still. How she can finish each night with so many of them while still taking the time to have a good time is beyond me.

Well, maybe enjoying the night while it’s still in progress isn’t really the point anymore.

So often, I’ve noticed that when my fellow twenty-something, Facebook-using cohorts get together, they spend the time taking photos of themselves having fun, so that they can “put them up on Facebook!” By doing so, they’re focusing more of their energy on a sort of “proof of fun” than on the fun itself.

Facebook’s quick photo upload feature allows all those armed with digital cameras to immediately share the shots they’ve taken of themselves while involved in great time having. For those wishing to view friends’ “proof of fun”, gratification is instantaneous—as is the ability to show the rest of the Facebook arena that life for the poster or tagged is full of friendship, full of enjoyment!

But the photos depict a reality that’s been staged. In essence, the party is now the dress rehearsal for the Facebook performance.

And a performance it certainly is.

The site’s audience of cyber-friends constantly watch for each other’s updates and photos. So the pressure’s on to spend as much as of the night taking pictures as is necessary to show those friends who weren’t there what an interesting life you lead.

Ask my generation “if a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” and the bulk of its members would say no. “Friends” must look to each other for the validation that their lives meet a “cool” standard.

For Facebook users, Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” is passe. They’ve replaced it with a new credo: “I upload photos; they are viewed, therefore I am.”

Facebook’s  homepage looks like it’s brimming with these daily updated albums. They offer images of users traipsing the cobblestone streets of foreign cities, engaged in various forms of debauchery or sharing a quiet evening with dear ones. In short, any scene—mundane or distinctive—has, much like in the tangible albums of yore, become fair game for their content.

But where looking through printed albums used to imply you knew the album’s owner, or at least had shared some prior face-to-face interaction, now anyone listed as a cyber contact may peer at online albums—real friend or not.

Joanna and I are simply cyber acquaintances. But even I know her life consists of far more than partying. For one thing, her profile says so.

She graduated with a Sociology major and an applied Psychology minor in 2007 and is now working on graduate work in Clinical Psychology.

But for the online world’s purposes, she’s the cheerful party-girl perennially pursuing hedonistic ends.

The raspy-voiced Califnia native living a multi-faceted existence in the southern reaches of the state told me on the phone she cultivates that image by barring those from her three dimensional life not friends with her on the site from seeing the photos or even from being able to look her up in Facebook’s search box.

And that double identity allows her to maintain her serious approach to recording and posting the evening’s antics.

“If I don’t bring my Canon Powershot SD750, it’s as if the night didn’t happen,” she said,  fully admitting that she, who spends three hours a day on the site views the “proof of fun” as an integral part of the real fun.

“Oh, I flip out when I forget it at home,” she declared while laughing hoarsely.

“It’s gotten to the point where if I don’t have a camera, I’ll buy another one to keep me going,” she said.

If she doesn’t bring the camera, she told me, her fun will be ruined.

“I’m kind of a ham, and anything we do worth a picture—tongues out, people running around sloshed, me making out with my girl friends—will be documented,” she explained, specifying that the only things disqualified from that documentation fall within the realm of art photography, like “sunsets and pretty spider webs.”

By saying “the night didn’t happen” unless it’s been recorded on a memory chip and uploaded to Facebook, it’s as if Joanna and her friends feel the Facebook version of the evening is as real as, or more real than, the night itself.

Of course, it’s not as if the “proof of fun” is the only reason for posting party photos, though.

“Uploading the files to Facebook has a lot to do with convenience,” said Jessica De Los Santos,  23, an avid Facebook user and contact of Joanna’s.

“If you’re trying to send them on a personal email account,” the USC PR graduate student continued, “You notice that sending large files takes too long and clogs the account.”

Jessica also emphasized two other reasons for putting those shots up.

“Since most people you know are likely to be on the site,” she explained, “it’s easier to show more people [at once] what you’ve been doing than doing so, as I said, through email.”

“Photos tell a story, and looking through them, putting them up, helps me remember what happened,” she said. “Joanna’s kind of our historian. We spend a lot of the time taking photos, but then she puts them up immediately, and we have the memory.”

Yet others recognize that putting up those photos may still be more about proving to their online friends that they’re having a good time.

“A lot of my friends on the East think and say LA is so boring,” said Kobe Swanson.

Swanson, a tall, smooth-voiced, large, faux diamond ear studs wearing, 23-year-old, majored in Acting at Atlanta, Georgia-based Morehouse College, is a graduate student in USC’s PR program.

“So when I go out and take pictures,” he noted, “I think ‘I’m going to put this on Facebook—no one will take the time to look through Flickr or email’—so I can prove to them that I’m out, I’m having fun and that LA’s not boring.”

“As far as staging shots,” he added, “Who isn’t guilty of it? People watch Top Model and Project Runway, and they want to be models too. Beforehand, if you did something, no one saw the pictures, but on Facebook, you can have your own sort of following. You can present yourself the way you want to while you make yourself your own celebrity.”

“So this is like your 15 minutes of fame,” he finished. “Everyone in my generation is super intent on trying to look perfect and on hav[ing] super cool pictures they want you to you to see, and by posing for or un-tagging them, you can regulate your image.”

But some people think they’ve regulated their images to the point where “real” life was suffering. My best friend Emily is one such person.

When I noticed my best friend Emily Adams was not visible in my own Facebook friend list, I called to ask her why she’d dropped me so callously.

Turned out, it wasn’t me she dropped, but Facebook.

But knowing that Emily used the site for very practical reasons made that decision seem both rash and surprising.

She recently moved to a Navajo reservation on the Arizona-New Mexico border to teach art at a Catholic school there. Though gregarious by nature, Emily moved to St. Michaels, Arizona knowing nobody, understanding her closest contacts reside far away in New York, Berkeley and Los Angeles. Aware that phone bills grow high without apparent effort, Emily has, since she moved, relied on the Internet, and especially Facebook, as a cheap medium by which to stay in touch with friends and family.

But though, like Joanna, she’d noticed how the site could allow her approach to a good time to be gauged by how she could later present it on the Facebook platform, she had real qualms with that and what she said it was doing to her conception of fun.

“Rather than doing what I had come here to do on my down time—paint and write and hike—I was obsessively checking Facebook to see what people were doing,” she said.

“More importantly,” she went on, “Anytime I would be doing anything, or on those occasions I’d go out with the other teachers I’ve met here who are my age, all I could think was ‘oh! I should take pictures of this and put them up on Facebook,’ more concerned with what those abroad would think of my life here than enjoying the moment itself.”

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Photo by Deborah Stokol. Room, 2006.